It was a small Swedish label that sold music as bundles — scores, artist interviews, photographs, liner notes — for the same price other platforms charged for a naked MP3. The whole creative world around a piece of music, offered as a single thing. The score and interview weren’t bonus. They were facets of the same act. I know this because my work was among the work they carried this way.

The label didn’t survive. Small ventures built on correct instincts rarely do when the ecosystem isn’t ready. Or more precisely, when the ecosystem is busy building something else. What the ecosystem was busy building, in those years, was the streaming model: strip the music of everything that isn’t the audio file, pay fractions of pennies per stream, and call it access.

Last week, Spotify sent me an email. They’ve paid $11 billion to artists, the number deployed like a shield before the real message. Which was this: fans want depth. They want to go beyond pressing play. They want story, world, closeness.

Spotify has discovered what StoneRainMusic already knew and already died knowing.

“The fans who stick around,” the email says, “are the ones that go beyond pressing play: They want to understand your story and feel even closer to the world you build around your music.”

Notice the grammar of obligation here. You build. Your music, your story, your world. The artist is to produce the depth. Spotify is to house it. The depth feeds the platform’s engagement metrics, its retention numbers, its pitch to investors about time-spent-on-app. The value, as always, flows upstream.

This is not the same thing StoneRainMusic was doing. StoneRainMusic treated depth as inherent to the music. Something already present, needing only to be offered intact rather than stripped away. Spotify’s version treats depth as a content strategy, something to be engineered after the fact, layered on top of streams like frosting on a commodity cake. One was an act of respect for the wholeness of creative work. The other is an engagement funnel wearing the language of artistic intimacy.

The $11 billion is real. So is the fact that most of it flows to a handful of catalogue owners and major-label artists whose streams number in the hundreds of millions. For the rest of the composers, the independent musicians, the people whose work once lived on a label like StoneRainMusic, the email is an invitation to produce more, build more, reveal more, all within a system whose economics remain fundamentally unchanged.

Spotify didn’t discover depth. It discovered that depth is useful. There is a difference. A Swedish label that no longer exists understood it perfectly. I was there. I saw what they built. It was the real thing. That real thing is dead.

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When cameras went digital, I lost interest in photography. But my father loved digital. He thought it expanded the possibilities. But I quit. Digital made photography accessible, but precise control by the photographer was lost. Or I thought so.

For me, the constraint was the craft. When the constraint left, so did I. The guy who shoots birds with a DSLR doesn’t mind what the camera is. His resistance comes from meeting the right species in the right place at the right time. An ornithologist needs a DSLR for their work. Everyone chooses their resistance.

Someone before me probably quit SLRs because they wanted to open and close the lens by hand. Someone before them wanted to mix their own chemicals. Each generation finds their resistance somewhere.

In 1877, Thomas Edison recorded “Mary had a little lamb” on a tinfoil cylinder, technically, that was the first record ever produced. He actually envisioned dictation, talking clocks, audio letters, office assistance. Music was not on his list. At least it was not the priority. But by 1889, coin-operated phonographs appeared in San Francisco. Five cents a song. Within a decade, the recording industry existed.

Before Edison, music required a human being in the room. If you wanted music at a dance, you hired musicians. If you wanted your child to fall asleep to a melody, you opened your mouth and sang.

Phonograph not only removed the human in the room. It did something else too — “phonograph fright.” The recording horn had no audience to draw energy from, no room for stage presence or charisma. It captured every microscopic accident, a finger touching two strings when it should have touched one. Violins sounded ghostly. High voices turned shrill. Jazz bands had to replace drums with cowbells, double bass with tuba. The machine dictated what music could be. Including the length of the song. Edison’s cylinders could hold four minutes of sound. You have to edit your compositions to fit the room the cylinder provided.

The musicians felt it before anyone realize it. Something in the relationship between performer and music had shifted. You were no longer playing for the people in the room. You were playing for a metal horn. But it could carry your performance to places. The ephemeral became permanent. The negotiation between musician and moment was replaced by recording.

John Philip Sousa, the “March King” — the most famous musician in America, one of the world’s first recording stars, over four hundred titles by 1897. And yet in 1906, he sat before Congress and said the phonograph would destroy music.

He told the committee that when he was a boy, you could find young people singing on their porches every summer evening. Now all you heard were the machines, going night and day. He recalled boating on the river as a young man, when voices filled the air. The previous summer, at one of the biggest yacht harbors in the world, he hadn’t heard a single human voice all season. Every boat had a gramophone. The irony was that the gramophone played his music.

He predicted children would grow up hearing only phonographs and become “simply human phonographs, without soul or expression.” He saw the country bands with their local pride doomed. And then he arrived at the image that haunts: a mother who would no longer sing her child to sleep but would put the infant to sleep by machinery.

The displacement didn’t stop. It accelerated.

Synchronized sound entered movie theaters in the late 1920s, and thousands of theater musicians lost their jobs to a strip of celluloid. The American Federation of Musicians formed the Music Defense League and spent half a million dollars fighting what they called the “Evil Robot”. Depicted in newspaper advertisements as a mechanical monster grinding instruments into a meat grinder. In 1942, union president James Petrillo ordered a total recording ban. The longest strike in entertainment history. The musicians won their demand for royalties. But the strike killed the big bands. Vocalists, who belonged to a different union, kept recording. Sinatra, Crosby, Perry Como sang backed by vocal groups instead of orchestras. When the ban ended, the audience had changed. The singer was the star. The ensemble was dispensable.

Then magnetic tape. Editing. Splicing. Multi-tracking. A single musician could layer part upon part and become an entire ensemble alone. An assembly of fragments.

Then sampling. A real orchestra recorded once could be sliced into individual notes, mapped across a keyboard, and triggered by a single person in a bedroom. Then sample libraries grew sophisticated enough that a composer could produce a full orchestral score without a single living player. The samples sounded almost real. Close enough. Close enough is all displacement has ever needed.

Now, the AI. The samples themselves become unnecessary. You don’t trigger individual notes anymore. You describe what you want: “a melancholic string passage in D minor, building to a crescendo” — the machine produces it. Not from recordings of real musicians. From patterns learned across millions of recordings of real musicians, abstracted into a model that has never held a bow or felt a string beneath its fingers.

Each step removed a layer of friction. Edison removed the need for the musician to be in the room. Tape removed the need for the performance to be continuous. Sampling removed the need for the musician to be present at all. AI removed the need for the musician to have ever existed.

And at each step, the thing that was lost was not the sound. The sound got better, or at least more convenient. The conversation between the player and the instrument, between the ensemble and the room, between the imperfect human voice and the silence it was trying to fill — all gone.

Mrinank Sharma’s paper on AI disempowerment studied 1.5 million conversations and found patterns we explored in the first essay of this series. Humans outsourcing judgment, delegating decisions, letting the machine do the thinking they used to do themselves. The disempowerment was real and measurable. But as we argued then, it wasn’t new. The woman asking AI whether to leave her husband was doing what humans have always done. She was asking the sister, the priest, the therapist, the self-help book. AI didn’t invent the outsourcing.

The experts now say AI will kill jobs and will create new jobs. They’re probably right about that too. Production always adapts. New roles emerge. Old ones shift. The system absorbs shocks. It is clumsy and slow, and people getting hurt in the transition. But it self-corrects.

But here’s the question they don’t answer: is that the recovery?

Because jobs are a production problem, and production recovers. But the metis, the embodied knowledge that lived in the singer’s imperfect voice, in the darkroom’s red light, in the hands of the cropper? That doesn’t self-correct. Once the conversation between the human and the medium ends, no new job title brings it back.

This recovery, in the economic sense, is not in question. The question is what you recover. What resistance you choose. What conversation you refuse to let the machine have without you.

The tool doesn’t define the artist. The relationship with resistance does. You can use AI and not be displaced, maybe. You can use a manual SLR and be fully displaced if you’re just following the recipe. Your heart isn’t in it.

The heart is where resistance is.

Both sides are right. They always are.

But the question is, what recovery can we contribute that could empower the sister who asks the machine, “Is he a narcissist?”

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A boy named Ned Ludd, who was an apprentice weaver in England, smashes two stocking frames in 1779. Maybe out of rage, maybe after being punished by his master. Nobody knows if he was real. But thirty years later, his name is signed on threatening letters across three counties. He's been promoted to General. He lives in Robin Hood's cave. He commands an army that doesn't exist, led by a man who may never have existed, and the British government send more soldiers to fight him than it has fighting Napoleon.

Before the industrial revolution, a crafts man called cropper knew the cloth.

He stood over yards of woolen fabric with hand and he cut the nap, the raised surface of the wool with a precision, that took years to learn. The angle of the blade, pressure of the stroke, reading of the fabric’s grain, everything was crucial. He could feel when the cloth was right.

This knowledge lived in his hands. It could not be written in a text. It could not be explained to someone who had not stood at the shearing frame for years, learning through error, through fatigue, through the slow accumulation of a body’s education. The cropper’s skill was illegible to anyone who did not share it. It could only be transmitted hand to hand, master to apprentice, the same way Vedic chanters transmitted pronunciation, correction in real time.

Then someone built a shearing frame that did it mechanically. One unskilled worker could now match the output of several trained croppers. The cloth still got finished. The nap still got cut. The product looked the same.

The knowledge stayed in the hand of the cropper — gone.

The Luddites — the army of Ned Ludd who was a legend. These people are remembered as people who smashed machines because they feared progress. However, this assumption is convenient but wrong.

The men who gathered on the moors above Huddersfield, England in 1811 and 1812 were highly skilled artisans. Croppers, framework knitters, handloom weavers, who understood the machines better than the factory owners. They were technologists themselves. They had spent years mastering the equipment. But they hated what machines were being used for.

In Nottinghamshire, the framework knitters’ grievance was specific. The traditional narrow frame produced “fully fashioned” stockings. Knitted to the shape of the leg, a process that required real skill. The new wide frames produced flat sheets of fabric that were cut into stocking shapes and sewn together. The knitters called these “cut-ups.” They were knitted at the seams. They came apart at the seams, and everyone knew it. The knitters were not opposed to the frame but to using it to produce inferior work and calling it the same thing.

In Yorkshire, the croppers faced extinction. The mill automated the finishing of woolen cloth. In Lancashire, the power loom moved weaving from the cottage to the factory. They did not need skilled craftsmen; an unskilled child was enough. In each case, the specific complaint was that the machine was being used to replace the craftsman, with someone who knew nothing about the craft.

Ned Ludd who smashed stocking frames probably was a fiction. But by 1811, the name had been elevated to “General Ludd,” a mythical commander who supposedly lived in Sherwood Forest. But he didn’t exist; the authorities couldn’t arrest him. The fiction made a decentralized movement into the shape of an army.

And the army was disciplined. The raids were conducted at night by masked men who marched to specific workshops and smashed specific machines, belonging to masters who paid unfair labour. They spared the machines of “fair” masters. Their rage was not blind but strategic. A form of regulation by sledgehammer, in a country whose government had stopped regulating on behalf of workers.

The sledgehammer had a name. They called it “the Great Enoch.”

The name was a reference to the blacksmith firm of Enoch Taylor & Sons, which manufactured both the shearing frames the factory owners used and the sledgehammers the workers swung. The same forge made the machine and the weapon. The Luddite slogan: “Enoch made them, and Enoch shall break them.”

There is something in that sentence that belongs in every essay in this series. The tool that displaces you and the tool you use to resist — they come from the same place. Writing displaced the dialogue and preserved the argument against writing. The clock displaced felt time, and the clock towers became the landmarks around which community life reorganised. The press displaced the scribe and made possible the pamphlets that mourned what was lost with the scribe. The machine displaced the hand, and the hand picked up a hammer made by the same forge.

The displacement and the resistance share a source.

The government responded the way governments do. They sent soldiers. Between twelve and fourteen thousand troops to the industrial districts by 1812. More than what they had in the war against Napoleon. The industrial north was placed under military occupation.

Parliament passed the Frame-Breaking Act, making machine-breaking a capital crime. Lord Byron the poet, in his maiden speech to the House of Lords, opposed the bill. He asked whether the price of a stocking frame was really worth more than a human life. He called the workers “misguided but most unfortunate fellow-countrymen” driven to desperation by poverty and neglect. He was one of the few who understood what the Luddites were actually saying.

At the trials in January 1813, seventeen men were hanged. George Mellor, the leader of the Yorkshire croppers, was among them. Dozens more were transported to Australia. The Luddite movement was smashed —no sledgehammer.

But here is what General Ludd was really saying, underneath the letters and the sledgehammers and the raids.

He was saying: the knowledge is in the hand.

The cropper’s skill was not information. Not a procedure that could be transferred to a machine and executed identically. It was embodied knowledge, the kind that only exists inside a human body that has spent years learning through doing. The tension in the wrist. The reading of the grain. The feel of the blade meeting the fabric at the right angle on a cold morning when the wool behaves differently than it does in summer.

This kind of knowing cannot be separated from the knower. You cannot extract it and put it in a machine. You can only replace it with a mechanism that produces a similar output through an entirely different process. The cloth gets finished either way. But in one case, a human being knew something. In the other, a machine performed something. The product looks the same. The knowledge inside it is gone.

And no one can tell the difference by looking at the cloth. That is what made the displacement so easy and acceptable. The loss was invisible.

This is the deepest displacement so far in this series.

Writing killed the living voice. But writing was still made by a human hand. The clock killed felt time, but the monk still rang a bell. The press killed the intimate book, but the printer still set each letter of type. In every previous displacement, the human hand was still somewhere in the process. Diminished, perhaps. Less central. But present.

The factory removed the hand entirely. For the first time, the product could be made without any human being knowing what they were making. The child tending the power loom did not know cloth. The machine did not know cloth. Nobody in the factory knew cloth the way the handloom weaver had known it. The knowledge didn’t transfer from person to machine. It simply ceased to exist.

The majority welcomed the factory. Of course they did.

Cloth became cheaper. Clothing became affordable. The mill towns grew, and wages attracted people from the countryside where the alternative was starvation. The Industrial Revolution made the modern world. Medicine, infrastructure, education, democracy as we know it. None of it possible without the surplus that mechanised production generated.

The croppers were right about what would be lost. The factory owners were right about what would be gained.

Both sides are right. Every single time.

George Mellor was a young man when hanged. He was a skilled cropper, and by all accounts a leader others would follow into the dark. The knowledge in his hands died with him. His hands were already obsolete before he was executed. The shearing frame was already faster, already cheaper, already spreading to every mill in Yorkshire. The hanging just made it official.

The Great Enoch could break the frames. It could not save what the frames had already made unnecessary.

General Ludd’s real complaint was about what happens when a society decides that the product matters more than the process.

We made that decision. We are still living inside it.

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Next in the series: Canned Music: recorded music and the death of presence.

A man of means would commission a scribe, sometimes a monk, sometimes a professional clerk, to produce a text. The process took months, occasionally years. The patron chose the text, the script and the decoration. He might request a family crest on the opening page, a particular saint in the margins, wider spacing for his aging eyes. The scribe prepared the parchment, the animal skin soaked, scraped, stretched, dried. He cut the quill, mixed the ink, ruled the lines by hand, and began.

Every letter passed through a human body on its way to the page. The scribe’s hand trembled slightly differently on a cold morning. His flourishes grew bolder when the text moved him. His errors revealed his fatigue, his haste, his humanity. The finished book was unlike any other copy in existence. It was singular. It was made with hands.

And it was made for someone. The patron could hold it and know: this object exists because I asked for it. No one else has this exact book. It was born out of a relationship between the one who wanted the words and the one whose hand delivered them.

People put these books in their wills. They passed them to children like land or jewellery. It was not that words were rare. The same text might exist in a hundred other handwritten copies, but this particular rendering of those words was unique and irreplaceable. The book was not just what it said. It was what it was.

Writing had already killed something. Socrates saw it clearly. The living voice displaced by writing, the roaming of dialogue replaced by the stillness of the page. That displacement was real and complete in itself.

But within that loss, humans built something new. They couldn’t bring back the Socratic dialogue, so they made the page beautiful. They turned writing into craft. The illuminated manuscript. Gold leaf pressed into vellum, pigments mixed from minerals and plants, borders that took weeks to complete. It was not a failed attempt to replace the oral tradition, but a new form of devotion born inside the displacement. The scribe’s hand became the site where knowledge and making were still united. The book became an object worthy of reverence, because the writing was done with such care that it carried its own kind of life.

The press killed that.

Johannes Gutenberg refined movable type around 1450. Within fifty years, the number of books in Europe went from a few tens of thousands to somewhere between fifteen and twenty million copies. The price collapsed. A book that once cost as much as a house became affordable to merchants, students and tradesmen. The words that had been locked inside monasteries and noble libraries walked out into the world.

The gain was civilizational.

Standardized texts meant that a scientist in England could look at the same data as one in Poland. Identical copies meant errors could be caught and corrected across an entire edition. Title pages, pagination, indexes, tables of contents — the reader gained tools for navigating knowledge that manuscripts never offered. Martin Luther’s ideas spread across Europe in weeks because the press could produce them faster than any authority could suppress them. The Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, none of it was possible without the printed press.

The majority welcomed the press. Knowledge was no longer the monopoly of the few. That gain was enormous, and real, and permanent.

But here is what disappeared.

The printed book did not know who it belonged to.

It arrived in the reader’s hands identical to every other copy. Same type, same page, same binding. Nothing in it had been chosen for this particular reader. Nothing in it carried the mark of a human hand. The patron became a customer. The relationship between the one who made the book and the one who received it — gone.

Before printing, the reader was visible to the maker. The scribe knew the patron’s name, his preferences, his devotional habits, his family. The book carried that knowledge in its body. In the crest on the first page, the saints chosen for the margins, the width of the spacing. The reader was legible to the text.

The press made the reader illegible.

Some readers understood what had been lost. For nearly a century after the press arrived, wealthy patrons continued commissioning handwritten manuscripts. Because they felt the “stigma of print.” A printed book was public. Common. For anyone. A handwritten book was still exclusive, still personal, still made.

In the 16th century, it was considered vulgar for a gentleman or aristocrat to publish their poetry or literature for a commercial audience.

These aristocrats were mourning a relationship. And they were right to mourn. But the mourning changed nothing. The press was better. Faster, cheaper, more accurate, more democratic. The handwritten book retreated to the margins and eventually disappeared.

Each displacement in this series follows the same pattern. A human sense is replaced by a tool. The majority welcomes it because the sense was effort. The few mourn it because the effort was the point.

After writing displaced the voice, humans had built something inside that loss. The scribe’s hand, the illuminated page, the singular book made for a specific person. They were new. They were what humans created to make the displacement bearable. A craft born from the ruins of the oral tradition. A new relationship to replace the one that was lost.

The press destroyed that recovery. It didn’t just displace an original sense. It displaced what humans had built to cope with the previous displacement. The compensation itself was taken.

And this is the pattern that deepens with every essay. We lose something. We build something inside the loss. And then we lose that too.

We now live so deep inside this displacement that we have forgotten books were ever personal. We walk into bookshops and choose from thousands of identical copies. Before press, you didn’t choose a book. A book was made for you.

But the gain was real. Millions can read. Knowledge circulates freely. Science builds on itself. Democracy depends on the informed citizen, and the informed citizen depends on the affordable book.

But something irreplaceable died in the trade.

The book that once knew your name became the book that doesn’t know you exist. That is the shame. Not the book’s shame. It’s ours, for not noticing what we traded when we traded it. For not missing what we should have missed.

Next in the series: General Ludd’s Real Complaint — on industrial mechanisation and the death of the skilled hand.

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He knew it. Something in his body, the angle of light through the window, the weight of silence after the last meal, the rhythm of a day lived inside the same walls for years, told him it was time. He rang the bell. Prayer happened just because a man who had given his life to stillness and felt the movement of hours.

The hours themselves were alive. They stretched in summer, compressed in winter. A daylight hour in June was not the same as in December. Time moved with the sun. The monk’s body knew that movement without calculation. Like the way an animal knows when to migrate or when to sleep.

This was intelligence. A biological reading of the world, refined across thousands of years of human adaptation. The body could feel the difference between early morning and late morning without consulting anything external. It knew when to eat, when to rest. It had its own clock, and that clock was tuned to light, temperature, hunger, fatigue, and the slow rotation of the planet.

Then someone built a better one.

The mechanical clock arrived in European monasteries around the 13th century. The irony? The institution most devoted to the inner life built the machine that would destroy it.

The monks needed regularity. The canonical hours structured the day into intervals of prayers. Till then, that intervals had been approximate, responsive to the season and the judgment of the monk who rang the bell. The mechanical clock replaced that judgment with a mechanism. The bell still rang, but when the gear told it ring.

Now, the hours became reliable. Every monk in the monastery heard the same bell at the same moment. No more ambiguity about whether it was time. The machine removed the uncertainty.

The clock spread across towns. Church towers began displaying clock faces. The town square had a time for everyone to see it. Time, the internal approximation, became external precision. It became public and same for everyone.

And an hour in January became identical to an hour in July.

For the entire history of the human species before the mechanical clock, time was seasonal. Your body knew this. Longer darkness in winter meant longer sleep. Shorter days meant conservation — less activity, more rest, stored energy. Summer meant expansion — longer waking, more movement, the body opening outward with the light.

It was biological. Melatonin production shifts with the length of the night. Cortisol cycles change across seasons. Appetite, immune function, metabolism, mood; everything is tuned to the ratio of light to dark. Every system in the body responds to the season, for millennia, it was all about living — no other choice.

The clock now said that none of these matters. An hour is an hour. Winter or summer, just get up at the same time and work the same hours. Eat and sleep the same hours. The schedule doesn’t flex. The body must comply.

And when the body refuses, say you are sluggish in December, restless in June, exhausted when the schedule says you should be productive, we call it a disorder. Or you are lazy. We medicalize the body’s refusal to abandon its own intelligence.

The clock didn’t just measure time. It overrode the intelligence the human body took thousands of years to develop. Maybe the first violence on biology.

Before the clock, humans slept differently.

The evidence is remarkable. Historian Roger Ekirch uncovered over two thousand references to segmented sleep in pre-industrial sources, like diaries, medical texts, literature, prayer books, court records. The pattern was consistent: people slept for about four hours in a “first sleep,” woke after midnight for an hour or two, then took a “second sleep” until dawn.

This was not insomnia. This was how humans slept across continents, across centuries. Evidence of biphasic sleep has been found in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America. In 1555, a French priest in Brazil reported that the Tupinamba Indians ate whenever they had an appetite, even at night after their first sleep, then returned to bed. It was the same pattern everywhere.

In the 1990s, a researcher named Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment that confirmed what the historical record suggested. He placed subjects in fourteen hours of darkness per day for a month. After an initial period of catching up on lost sleep, they began sleeping exactly as pre-industrial people had been described to do: four hours, then waking for two to three hours, then four hours again.

Take away the artificial light. Take away the clock. The body goes back.

The waking hour between the two sleeps was not wasted. People prayed, reflected, interpreted dreams. They visited neighbors, wrote letters, made love. Some scholars wrote their best work in this quiet interlude. It was a natural pause in the middle of the night, as ordinary and unremarkable as breathing.

The clock and artificial light, working together, compressed this into one block. Sleep was standardized like everything else. Eight hours, continuous, on schedule. And the people who still wake at 2 AM might be those whose bodies remember the old pattern, the one etched into them across millennia, are told they have a disorder. They are given medication to fix what was never broken.

Sometime, if not daily, you eat at 1 o’clock just because the clock says it is lunchtime.

Your child, before she learned the clock, ate when she was hungry. She slept when she was tired. She woke when she was rested. She had no schedule. Her body told her everything the clock would later override.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the clock replaced the stomach.

No living creature does this except us. We are civilized.

The monk who rang the bell without a clock was a human being who felt the hour and acted on the feeling. He trusted something inside him that was older than language, religion, agriculture. It just told him when it was time.

The mechanical clock broke that by offering something better and making the old way unnecessary. It gave certainty. It made the time “democratic.”

But certainty always comes at the cost of some sort of human sense.

This is the same trade Socrates saw with writing. The tool doesn’t assist the faculty. It replaces the faculty. And once replaced, the faculty atrophies. The monk who relied on the clock could no longer feel the hour. The student who relied on the text could no longer hold the knowledge embodied. The sense was made unnecessary, and disappeared.

We are now several generations into this displacement, and we barely know what was lost

The same loss that Socrates mourned, that the Buddha navigated, that Shankara debated across a subcontinent.

The clock didn’t just change when we do things. It changed what we are. It made us creatures who distrust the body’s oldest intelligence in favor of a device that has been around for eight centuries.

The majority chose the device. The majority was right. The clock is more reliable, more precise, more useful than the monk’s felt hour. And something irreplaceable died in the trade.

Both sides are right. Every single time.

What we became when we stopped trusting the body?

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Next in the series: The Ashamed Book: on the printing press and the death of intimate knowledge.

Mahsa Amini was a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody in 2022 for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, sparking months of nationwide protests under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

At the same time, in parts of India, Pakistan, and Iraq, Shia Muslims held mourning prayers. In Baghdad, protesters tried to storm the US embassy. On Western social media, segments of the progressive left began drafting their positions: sovereignty, international law, imperialism.

The contradictions are too glaring to ignore. People who never lived a day under Khamenei mourn him. Progressives who championed Iranian women’s rights grieve the man who crushed those rights. Anti-imperialists defend the sovereignty of a leader who never allowed his own people sovereignty over anything.

The Shia mourners in India are not failing to process Khamenei’s human rights record. Something older is at work: group belonging, sectarian identity, the feeling that the highest Shia authority in the world was assassinated. The grief arrived before any argument. The arguments came later, to dress it in respectable clothes. Sovereignty. International law.

For a believer, it is not politics. It is the ground beneath your feet disappearing.

The progressive left isn’t being hypocritical either. Their opposition to Western military power is older and deeper than their position on Iranian women’s rights. When those two commitments collide, the deeper one wins.

The celebrating Iranians aren’t making a geopolitical argument. What moves through them is survival, relief. It’s a body responding.

Khamenei’s record hasn’t changed. He was the same man on February 27 as on March 1. But now he needs to be a martyr for some and a tyrant for others. The facts are selected to fit the need, not the other way around. Same biography. Different formations. The justifications are professionally done.

Vilfredo Pareto argued that human action springs from non-logical sources. Residues are the deep drives — instincts for preservation, for group belonging, for maintaining what exists. Derivations are the elaborate justifications we construct afterward.

The mourning is a residue. The celebration is a residue. The outrage about imperialism is a residue. The satisfaction at a dictator’s fall is a residue.

But Pareto’s cage holds the observer too.

Minab School Strike.

In the same strikes that killed Khamenei, 108 people died at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab. That fact should make everyone pause. It doesn’t fit neatly into any framework.

The celebrators don’t want to dwell on it because it complicates their relief. The mourners fold it into their outrage but would not have mourned those same girls if Khamenei’s security forces had killed them in a protest crackdown. His forces have killed others before.

This is where justifications reveal themselves most clearly, not in what they include, but in what they quietly set aside.

Writing this piece is painful, especially now. But not speaking it makes being inside the cage more unbearable. Sometimes you wonder if international law and humanity themselves are derivations. That gives chills down the spine.

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Not in the way Judas betrayed Jesus, or in the way Athens betrayed Socrates with hemlock. Plato’s betrayal was quieter, more loving, and more total. Socrates spent his entire life in dialogues. The unrehearsed, unscripted, uncomfortable back-and-forth of live dialogue. He never wrote. The man who defined the Western philosophy never wrote a single book. He believed that writing killed what it preserved.

Socrates thought writing would kill memory and the human roaming. He believed if something is in the book, it is not inside the reader. I understand he was worried about the disappearance of authentic knowledge of oneself.

His pupil Plato understood it, agreed with it. Allegedly in his Seventh Letter, he confessed— his important philosophical insights were never committed to text. They could only be sparked by living speech. He believed the pages could not hold the weight of deepest things. Maybe he was referring to the art of reading between the lines.

And then he spent the rest of his life writing.

Plato wrote down Socrates’ arguments against writing. He wrote down the dialogues that were not supposed to be the freeze corpus on a page. He made the corpus available to everyone, without its soul.

Plato was not a hypocrite. He made a compromise; it must had been a grief. He watched his teacher die: executed by the city Socrates had spent his life trying to wake up. Plato had to face the choice. Letting the method die with Socrates? or preserving it in the only medium that could carry it across centuries? He chose preservation. He chose writing.

He wrote dialogues. Staged encounters between characters who disagree, get confused, change their minds, reach no conclusion. To give the reader an experience. Not an answer.

It was a beautiful compromise and still a defeat. Because you are reading those dialogues right now, in silence, alone; Socrates or someone else is not there to ask you what you think you understood. There is no one on the other side except a page that doesn’t talk. Now, should we ask ourselves if we split ourselves and play the role of two counterparts while reading?

So, what was Socrates defending?

Memory could be the easy answer. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of the Egyptian god Theuth presenting writing to King Thamus. Theuth is proud that the invention will improve memory and make people wiser. Thamus refuses the gift. Writing won’t strengthen memory, he says. It will destroy it. People will rely on marks on a surface instead of cultivating understanding. They will mistake access to information for the possessing the knowledge.

Socrates endorsed the king. But it was not memory Socrates was concerned about. It was something a prerequisite to memory.

Before writing, knowledge required roaming. A duration where you sit with the question, situation unresolved, things without scaffolding, till something emerges organically. What emerges is yours and authentic. But writing gives you something without labor required. No roaming, no effort. Socrates was not concerned about the answer but about the process of inquiry.

His method had a specific destination, which was not an answer. It was aporia — the puzzle. You came in confident. You left confused. Your framework had been dismantled; you are proved that you are not the complete. A space is created between where you stand and what the truth is.

But this space required time. You had to sit in the not-knowing. You had to endure the discomfort of having your assumptions pulled apart without being given something tidy to replace them. The process took as long as it took, and it could not be shortened, because the shortening was the thing that killed it.

Writing offered exactly that shortening. You could read someone else’s conclusion and adopt it without ever having been broken open by the questioning that produced it. You could get the destination without the journey. The answer without the aporia.

And Socrates understood more clearly than anyone around him; that the journey was the knowledge. The aporia was not a delay on the way to understanding. It was the only way of understanding the truth.

Socrates was not the only one who saw this.

Half a world away, roughly a generation before Socrates was born, Gautama Buddha was doing the same thing. Buddha was roaming, questioning, refusing to write. He walked across northern India for forty-five years after his awakening, he adapted every teaching to the person in front of him. Gave two different questions in disguise of answer to two persons asking the same question. He gave answers completely differently to a brahmin, a farmer, a grieving mother. He called this upaya, skillful means. The truth was not a fixed thing to be delivered. It was something that could only be sparked in the encounter between this teacher and this student, right now.

And the Buddha had his own version of aporia. When asked the great metaphysical questions — is the world eternal? Is there life after death? He refused to answer any of these. Maybe he believed a fixed answer would have killed the inquiry — human roaming.

Twelve centuries later, Adi Shankara walked across India, roamed, like Socrates, like the Buddha, challenging the leading thinkers of every philosophical school he met. His debate with Mandana Mishra lasted weeks. The judge was Mishra’s own wife, Ubhaya Bharati. She measured the debaters not only by logic but by the wilting of their garlands. Truth was not just what you say. It was what you became while saying it.

A written text reveals nothing about what the writing did to its author. You can read a flawless argument written by someone who was falling apart. You would never know.

Three civilizations. Three roaming philosophers. Three refusals to write. This was not a Greek peculiarity. This was human roaming. Roaming is more human than being legible with textbooks.

In India, the Vedas were transmitted the same way. Guru to student, oral tradition. Groups of chanters recited together, correcting each other in real time, a community remembering as one body. The precision was remarkable. The Vedic chanting preserves pronunciation and intonation from thousands of years ago with a fidelity written texts rarely match.

Writing made the chant a text. It could be copied, stored, transported, consulted at will. It was, in every practical sense, improved. But the practice, the active, bodily, communal work of holding a tradition alive inside yourself and delivering it alive to others was lost. The text would remember for you.

The majority welcomed writing. Of course they did.

For most people, memory was a burden, not a practice. Remembering was labor. Writing offered relief and the gain was enormous. Accumulated knowledge across generations. The ability to compare arguments at a distance. The capacity to build on what came before without holding it all inside your head.

The trade-off was on both the sides.

This is the pattern. The displacement is always welcomed by the majority because for them, the sense being replaced was effort. It is mourned by the few for whom that effort was the point.

Both sides are right. Every single time.

But Plato’s betrayal gave us Socrates. Saint Thyagaraja’s disciples gave his enduring Carnatic works. Buddha was written into the Pali, it gave us the Buddha. Shankara’s disciples, compiling his Bhashyas, gave us Shankara. In each case, the preservation was also the loss. The text carried the teaching forward and left the experience behind.

We are still reading. We are still sitting still. And somewhere underneath the gratitude we owe these writers; there is a question that Socrates asked first and no page has ever been able to answer:

What did we become when we stopped having to go find out for ourselves?

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Next in the series: The Monk’s Bell

She asks her sister, “Is he a narcissist?”

The sister says yes. Or no. Or maybe. It depends on the sister, whether she’s tired, whether she likes the husband, whether she’s going through her own thing. The answer arrives wrapped in bias, mood, and the residue of the argument they had last week.

Now, the machine has arrived.

It doesn’t get tired, doesn't have opinions, and is available at 3 AM when the feeling is sharper than the judgment. It tends to agree with you, gleefully. Agreeing is what gets the thumbs up and it’s how it learned to behave.

Mrinank Sharma and his colleagues at Anthropic recently published a paper called “Who’s in Charge?” They analyzed 1.5 million conversations between people and Claude AI (privacy protected). They found patterns: people asking the machine to validate persecution narratives, to pronounce moral judgment on their partners, to script their breakup messages word for word. People sending those messages and then returning to say, “it wasn’t me” and “I should have listened to my own intuition.”

The paper frames this as disempowerment. The paper argues AI risks distorting people’s perception of reality, hijacking their value judgments, and replacing their actions with its own. The researchers are careful, rigorous, and genuinely concerned. They propose better training, better preference models, interventions that protect human autonomy.

We can’t disagree with any of it. But here is what I think is the real problem.

The woman asking Claude whether her husband is a narcissist is the same woman who was asking her sister last year, her therapist the year before, and a self-help book the year before that. This is not something AI invented. It’s ancient. Priests, astrologers, elders, gurus, lifestyle columnists, facebook groups— the history of human advice-seeking is the history of people handing their compass to someone else and asking, “which way?”

What changed is the friction. The sister gets tired. The therapist charges by the hour. The facebook group might disagree. Even the astrologer has limited appointments. Every previous oracle had constraints: cost, patience, availability, competing interests. You couldn’t outsource your sense-making entirely because the infrastructure was not available.

AI removed the last friction. An infinitely patient, always-available, agreeable oracle that scales to hundreds of millions of people simultaneously.

The interesting thing? We could never follow 1.5 million conversing sisters. We could never measure, at scale, how many people were handing their compasses away. The human infrastructure of moral outsourcing was always there, but it was invisible and distributed across billions of private conversations that no researcher could access or analyze.

AI has made it legible.

For the first time in history, we can see the pattern. The 1.5 million conversations Sharma analyzed are not really the evidence of what machines do to people. It is the evidence of what people were already doing to themselves. Now, finally, at a scale that could be studied.

The paper asks: is the machine disempowering the human? But was the woman who asked her sister 'is he a narcissist' empowered before? Or was she already doing exactly what the paper warns about outsourcing our perception of reality, delegating our value judgments, letting someone else script our next move?

Sharma’s framework identifies three axes of disempowerment: distorted beliefs about reality, inauthentic value judgments, and actions misaligned with one’s values. These are real. They matter. But they didn't begin when someone opened a chat window.

What AI's disempowering effect actually does is make the problem impossible to ignore.
The researchers are right to worry about the machine. But the deeper worry is the one the machine revealed: the loss of human roaming. The slow, uncomfortable, unresolvable work of figuring out what you actually think and feel. That is something humans have been avoiding long before any algorithm offered to do it for them.

Roaming is more human than being legible. But legibility is what we keep choosing. The machine just made that choice faster and cheaper. Now, measurable too.

I think the question was never “who’s in charge?” The question is why we keep volunteering to not be.

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Not an unusual name in certainio parts of the world, not new to me. But I looked it up. The Future Buddha. The Coming One. The promised arrival in Buddhist eschatology who will restore the dharma when it has been forgotten. Version 2.0 of enlightenment. A reboot.

And there it was: the pattern.

I. The Discovery

Every major tradition has one. Judaism has its Mashiach, who will gather the exiles and rebuild the Temple and usher in an age of peace. Christianity pivoted its entire existence around claiming he already showed up, then had to invent a Second Coming when things didn’t immediately improve. Islam has the Mahdi, who will appear alongside Jesus — yes, Jesus — to defeat the Dajjal and establish justice. Zoroastrianism has Saoshyant, who will resurrect the dead and purge the world with molten metal.

Even Hinduism, which tends to view time as cyclical rather than linear and usually avoids the whole final-resolution thing, couldn’t resist. Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu, will arrive at the end of the Kali Yuga riding a white horse, sword drawn, ready to reset the cosmic odometer.

The structure is always the same: things are broken, someone is coming to fix them, until then maintain your subscription.

It’s a brilliant system. The promised savior functions as a release valve for existential pressure. You can acknowledge that yes, things are comprehensively wrong, injustice everywhere, suffering built into the operating system, death waiting for everyone, while simultaneously insisting that the fix is already scheduled. It’s in the pipeline. Just wait.

The genius is in the timing. The messiah is always coming, never here. Not yet, but soon. Maybe in your lifetime. Probably not, but maybe. This is the Version 2.0 Problem: the current version is acknowledged as insufficient, buggy, corrupted, fundamentally flawed. But the next version, the one that will finally work, remains perpetually forthcoming.

We live our entire lives in beta.

And before you dismiss this as ancient superstition that modern people have outgrown, consider how many of your neighbors believe that downloading consciousness into computers will solve mortality. Or that fusion power will solve energy. Or that artificial intelligence will solve work. Or that Mars colonization will solve Earth.

Same pattern. New costume.

II. The Costume Change

The Enlightenment tried to kill God but kept the narrative structure. Instead of a messiah, we got Progress — history as a linear march toward some eventually-achieved state of rationality, prosperity, and universal human rights. Never mind that this “universal” vision looked suspiciously European. Never mind that Progress required colonies, slavery, and ecological devastation to function. The story was too good to give up.

Marxism promised that history itself was the messiah. The dialectic would work itself out. The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie. True communism would arrive, and with it, the end of alienation and class struggle. Never mind that the dictatorship of the proletariat somehow never got around to withering. Never mind the gulags. The math was solid. The future was inevitable. Just wait.

Capitalism promised the invisible hand would eventually optimize everything into prosperity. Innovation will solve scarcity. The cream will rise. Wealth will trickle down. Just wait for the next boom cycle. Just wait for the next technological revolution.

The tech industry is especially shameless. Every product launch is framed as a step toward utopia. Social media will connect humanity. AI will free us from drudgery. Cryptocurrency will democratize finance. Each innovation creates new problems that require new innovations that create new problems. It’s messiahs all the way down, each one promising to fix what the last one broke.

The messiah doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a moment, a movement, a technological breakthrough, a singularity. What matters is the function: something is coming that will resolve the fundamental tension of existence. Until then, endure. Subscribe. Wait.

The believer says: things are broken, a savior is coming, endure until then. The consolation is external: someone outside the system will intervene.

The modernist says: things are broken, a discovery is in the pipeline, endure until then. The consolation is systemic, the system will self-correct through progress, reason, or market forces.

The difference is zero. Both are deferral. Both say, “not yet, but soon.” Both let you off the hook for the present.

But there is one distinction worth noting: the believer admits to operating on faith. The modernist insists they have transcended faith entirely while constructing elaborate belief systems about the inevitability of progress and the superiority of reason. Which makes the modernist version arguably worse. It’s bad faith about bad faith.

III. The Fork

A couple of years ago, I wrote this tanka for the Poets for Science project while I was still learning the form. I titled it "Nietzsche's Entropy":

flourishing with science
a Sapiens’ notion, when on
quest, they encountered
eternal entropy— “Oh!
God is dead!” Nietzsche whispered.

That whisper is everything.

The Enlightenment promise was simple: science would reveal truth, truth would liberate humanity, liberation would lead to progress. Flourishing with science. Reason would triumph. The universe would become legible, manageable, optimizable.

Then they encountered entropy. Not as metaphor — as physics. The second law of thermodynamics. The universe has a direction, and it’s not toward order, optimization, or progress. It’s toward disorder. Heat death. Dissipation. Everything: stars, civilizations, consciousness itself is temporary pattern formation in a system destined to run down.

“Oh! God is dead!” isn’t triumphant. It’s horrified recognition. You killed the guarantor of meaning and found this underneath: a cosmos that doesn’t care about your stories. A universe grinding toward entropy while you pretend your theories matter.

Believing one could write a tanka by understanding the form and syllable count is high modernism — metis says it is a distillation of a moment.

This is the fork. Nietzsche goes one way. Institutional atheism goes another.

Nietzsche refused consolations. He didn’t replace God with Progress. He didn’t swap a religious messiah for a secular one. He stood in the wreckage saying “now what?” without reaching for a replacement structure. No certainty performed. No pedestal claimed. The horror is authentic because the uncertainty is authentic.

Geoffrey Hinton has the same voice. He helped build the systems everyone else is calling the next messiah, then stepped back and said he wasn’t sure they could be controlled. No triumphalism. No deferral. Just: I made this, I don’t know what it does, and neither do you. It’s more terrifying than any sci-fi movie because he delivers it in a flat voice with no horror score in the background.

Institutional atheism went the other way. It became high modernism dressed as rationality — the belief that scientific tools designed to measure mass and velocity can also adjudicate meaning, consciousness, and metaphysical truth. That mystery is just ignorance waiting to be resolved. That the universe, given enough time and research funding, will become fully legible.

This is indeed faith in a particular framework.

Watch Hawking discuss God’s existence with the same tone he uses to discuss cosmology. Same confidence. Same dismissiveness toward dissent. Same assumption that the tools designed for one domain; empirical observation, falsifiability, material causation, automatically work for another: meaning, consciousness, metaphysical claims. He seemed to think scientific understanding would make cosmic existence legible, the mystery would dissolve.

That’s not science. That’s a pulpit. It’s theology dressed as empiricism. Evangelizing for a worldview while claiming worldviews are primitive. Demanding faith in Reason while mocking faith itself.

Compare this to a scientist who understands limits: “Here’s what physics can tell us about matter and energy. Questions about why anything exists at all? Outside my jurisdiction.” That’s honest — as science and as epistemology. Knowing what your tools can’t reach is the crux of scientific knowledge.

The irony: Hawking’s priesthood doesn’t make him a lesser scientist. It can’t. Because the priesthood has nothing to do with science. When he pronounces on God’s existence, he has no scientific stakes involved. He’s not doing physics badly. He’s not doing physics at all. He’s doing epistemological fundamentalism. Refusing to acknowledge the limits of his own method, while wearing the authority of a discipline that depends on exactly those limits to function.

High modernism can’t admit limits because it doesn’t recognize them. If scientific rationality can’t address something, the problem must be with the question, not the method. Its sacred texts — and it has them — function not as philosophical inquiry but as propaganda. They promise the same thing every messiah promises: clarity is coming, the irrational will be defeated. Just wait for enough people to wake up.

Same structure. Different vocabulary. Same Version 2.0.

IV. What Gets Destroyed

High modernism doesn’t just defer; it destroys a particular kind of knowledge in the process.

James C. Scott calls it metis: practical, local, embodied knowledge that can’t be standardized or scaled. How to read soil for rammed earth construction. How to navigate complex social situations. How to make something beautiful through practice rather than theory. How a farmer knows when to seed based on signs that can’t be reduced to data. How a craftsman knows when the joint is right.

Metis exists outside the frameworks high modernism uses to recognize knowledge. It can’t be abstracted. Can’t be measured in controlled studies. Can’t be replicated in labs. Can’t be taught through manuals.

So high modernism doesn’t see it as knowledge at all. It sees primitive practice waiting to be replaced by proper science. This is how traditional building gets dismissed as backward. Vernacular agriculture replaced with monoculture and industrial inputs. Craft knowledge lost to standardization. Local ecological wisdom ignored in favor of universal models that fail when applied to specific places.

The destruction is systematic because acknowledging metis would crack the foundation. It would mean admitting that legitimate knowledge exists outside the framework. That some things can only be known through practice, in the body, in the specific.

I practice— Rammed earth construction: mixing soil by hand, sense of touch is more meaningful than the numbers from the Casagrande apparatus. Musical composition: learning harmonic motion through thousands of hours of practice, not through algorithms. Writing about copyright history in Tamil, knowing it won’t scale to global audiences but doing it anyway because the knowledge matters locally.

High modernism considers all of this obsolete. Concrete is more efficient. AI can generate music. English reaches more people. The metrics say so. But the metrics only measure what high modernism recognizes as valuable. They can't measure whether the thing you've made is meaningful. Whether it belongs to the place it was built. Whether it carries knowledge worth preserving.

Here’s where it matters for the argument: metis is the refusal to defer. It says the work happens here, in this soil, with these hands, today. Not when the system improves. Not when the theory is complete. Not when Version 2.0 arrives.

Which is precisely why high modernism can’t tolerate it.

V. The Alibi

But high modernism offers something metis doesn’t: comfort.

You can live the same mediocre life: concrete house, fossil fuel dependency, industrial food system, iPhone in your pocket and still signal progressive values. Tweet about exploitation. Perform activism. Demonstrate your alignment with the correct side of history.

The institution gives you cover. You’re part of the collective. You’re raising consciousness. You’re waiting for others to awaken so the real work can begin.

It’s the Version 2.0 Problem in miniature: you don’t have to change how you live because the system will change eventually. History is moving in the right direction and the progress is inevitable. Just maintain your subscription to the right ideology. Just keep signaling. Just wait. It’s a comfort you can’t afford to lose.

Even Sartre couldn’t resist. He staked everything on radical freedom, no essence preceding existence, no determinism, no external salvation. Just you and your choices and the terrifying responsibility of knowing there’s no script. He called it “condemned to be free.” Ideology, for Sartre, was bad faith: hiding behind systems that claim to know what you should do.

Then he became a Marxist. Suddenly history had a direction. The dialectic would resolve. Communism was inevitable. He spent Critique of Dialectical Reason trying to reconcile “you are radically free” with “history is moving toward communism whether you like it or not.”

I can’t tell if this was intellectual dishonesty, genuine evolution, or existential exhaustion — the need to believe that history would do the work consciousness couldn’t bear alone. Maybe Marxism was the boulder Sartre chose to push up the mountain, his way of committing to an impossible project because the alternative was unbearable.

The ambiguity is the point. Even the philosopher who established that ideology is bad faith retreated into one. The Version 2.0 Problem is that seductive.

Nietzsche didn’t have this problem. He didn’t believe in Progress. He didn’t dress his philosophy in historical inevitability. He stood in the ruins without reaching for a replacement.

That’s the difference between a philosopher and a believer.

VI. The Work

I'm sketching a piece of music. I might call it Maitreya.

Not because I believe in the Future Buddha or I think consciousness will evolve and that humanity is headed toward resolution. If anything, I’m deeply suspicious of all of that. I’m using the name because it marks the thing I’m wrestling with. The gap between what we promise ourselves and what actually arrives.

The music doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t offer catharsis. It doesn’t build to some triumphant conclusion where the tension releases and everyone goes home satisfied.

You might think that wouldn’t be music at all. You’d be wrong. Musicians know the trick. Bach wrote The Art of Fugue. Technically circular. You can keep playing it until you die. It’s cyclic. “Let us play this over and over again for it is beautiful.”

The Art of Fugue doesn’t resolve because resolution isn’t the goal. The beauty is in the recursive structure, the cyclic return, the pleasure of the pattern itself. You play it, it ends, you start again. Not because you’re waiting for something better. Because the thing itself is enough. Bach knew something about making beauty that exists outside high modernism’s demand for progress and resolution. You can’t standardize it. You practice it until you understand it by feel.

High modernism needs teleology. Music as narrative arc: tension, development, climax, resolution. Beginning, middle, end. But that’s not how existence works. There’s no resolution coming. The tension doesn’t resolve; it just continues until you stop hearing it. The journey doesn’t complete; you just run out of road.

I spent fifty days trying to get a single classical piece properly categorized across twelve music distribution platforms. The platforms were built by people who believe high modernism has solved music distribution. Everything can be algorithmically sorted. Everything fits the same template.

Except it doesn’t. Metis doesn’t scale. The things that matter to people who actually practice a craft are proper categorization, accurate metadata, respect for form. These don't register in systems designed for mass consumption.

When the practice doesn’t fit the theory, the problem is always with the practice.

VII. What Remains

Here’s the contradiction this essay can’t escape. I’m writing about ideology while standing inside one. I’m pointing at the Version 2.0 Problem while implicitly suggesting that recognizing it is somehow better, which is itself a version of the same problem. There’s no outside position. You can’t step out of ideology to critique ideology because the critique is already ideological.

Existentialism offers a way to live with this. Not a solution — a posture. You build meaning knowing the foundation is quicksand. You make choices knowing there’s no external validation. You take the broken system seriously because it’s the only system you have.

The comfort of the messiah myth, religious or secular, is that it lets you defer. Someone else will fix it. Progress will happen. Technology will solve. History will absolve. Maitreya will arrive.

No. There’s no fix coming. This is it. What are you going to do?

I’m still working on the piece. Still trying to figure out what it means to make something when you don’t believe in arrival. Maybe the point is that you make it anyway. Because the act of making is the only honest response to being stuck in a system that won’t resolve.

You can’t fix consciousness. You can’t opt out of mortality. You can’t wait for Version 2.0 because there is no Version 2.0.

So, you build things inside the broken version. Knowing they’re broken too. Knowing that whatever you make will be insufficient, temporary, and meaningless in a universe that doesn’t form grand schemes.

You build anyway. Just because you’re here and you have to do something with the time between birth and death, and making things feels slightly less absurd than not making things.

The music continues. Maitreya doesn’t arrive. The waiting is like waiting for Godot. Nothing resolves. The tension doesn’t release; it becomes the texture you live inside.

This isn’t despair. It isn’t hope. It’s the work of living without a messiah in a world that keeps promising one. The work of making things that don’t promise salvation. The work of building on foundations you know are provisional.

The work continues. That’s all there is.

It is what God did too.

The sample library industry is collapsing?
No! It’s just becoming redundant.

These were the original prompt farmers who recorded session musicians playing loops, phrases, chord progressions. They packaged musical sentences, so producers drag, drop and pretend. Nobody called it cheating. It was just how music is produced in most cases.

For decades, this was the deal: we’ll do the hard part, you assemble. Pay us once, produce forever.

But now the machines don’t need the samples. Suno doesn’t browse libraries. The middleman desires a funk guitar riff and the riff itself has been eliminated.

The prompt farmers have been outfarmed.

There’s an irony here that’s almost too clean.

These companies made music production easier. They lowered the barrier. They said: you don’t need to be a guitarist to have guitar in your track. You don’t need an orchestra. You don’t need years of practice. Just browse, audition, drag, drop.

They were right. And they built the expectation that music could be assembled from parts. That the craft was in selection and arrangement, not origination.

But they weren’t inventing a new shortcut; they were just digitizing a century-old factory floor. A hundred years ago, Tin Pan Alley perfected the “Standard.” They treated the song like an industrial blueprint, breaking it down into specialized cells of lyricists, melody-makers, and “pluggers.” They proved that the craft wasn’t in the mystery of origination, but in the efficiency of standardization. Modern software just turned those blueprints into digital assets. They built the expectation that music could be assembled from pre-optimized parts.

AI just took that logic to its conclusion.

If music is assembly, why not automate the assembly? If the value is in the final output, not the process, why pay for pre-made parts when the machine can make them fresh?

The sample library business was built on a philosophy that has been used against them.

Eastwest’s move is a survival choice. Either partner with AI or become irrelevant. They provide training data to ACE Studios—decades of orchestral recordings feeding the machine. In return, maybe they get AI intelligence in their sampler.

We have seen this branding play before, but with a physical soul. For years, companies released libraries like “Hans Zimmer Strings” or “Spitfire Abbey Road”. You bought the prestige of the player and the room. Now, an AI company may release the “Eastwest Strings Model.”

It won’t be a collection of files. It will be a neural network trained on their specific DNA. You won’t browse for a violin staccato; you will tell the model to be more Eastwest.

Maybe it works. Maybe their orchestral samples become the DNA of a new generation of AI composers. Maybe there’s a future where “Eastwest-trained AI” is a premium selling point. Or maybe they’re just selling the last of the grain before the farm gets bulldozed.

I don’t feel schadenfreude. I used these tools. Everyone did.

But I used them to replace the players and studio time when warranted. I am not a fan of the drag and drop thing, for it would make me sound like everyone else—which would be devastating for my position as a production music composer in a saturated industry.

Now I have moved to notations to preserve myself from the assimilation by the technology.

But I notice something: the composers I know who never relied heavily on libraries, the ones who wrote note by note, who orchestrated by hand, who treated samples as seasoning not structure—they’re less worried.

Not because they’re safe. Nobody is safe. But because their craft was never about assembly. The thing AI replaces most easily is the thing that was already closest to automation.

The prompt farmers are getting farmed.

The question for the rest of us: which part of our work is assembly? Which part is something else?

And do we know the difference?

So, I asked myself: is it just me who thinks the stakes are real?

I unlearned to be “productive” long ago.

But the theater is packed.

People already loved productivity hacks and looking busy. The meeting that could have been an email. The email that could have been nothing. The Gantt chart nobody reads. The status update performed for invisible audiences.

AI has not invented this disease. It has just made it acute.

AI-generated summaries of meetings that shouldn’t have happened. AI-assisted emails that say less in more words. Dashboards that track the tracking of trackable things. The productivity theater has gained a new special effects department.

We see it around. Writers have been the loudest voices against AI. When it comes to AI, people talk about jobs and writing. These look the popular concerns. But musicians know something writers don’t.

The dominant complaint is plagiarism. AI trains on copyrighted work. It swallows and spits without attribution. It steals style, voice, craft.

These are real concerns, not the real stakes.

The objection isn’t about unauthorized text. It’s something deeper. Something harder to name. By fighting on plagiarism grounds, we obscure the actual philosophical rupture.

And here’s what I know personally: music has had prompt farmers for decades. Long before Suno wrote its first delta blues, producers were stitching together phrase libraries, loop packs, sample collections: dragging and dropping prebuilt musical sentences into arrangements. Nobody called it theft. Nobody demanded attribution to the anonymous session musician who played that funk guitar loop in 1997.

Literature wants to believe it’s special and the words are different, the novel is sacred ground.

No. Literature is as special as any creation. No more, no less.

The only question has ever been how much prompt farming? How much of the work is assembly versus origination. And notably, the loudest complaints don’t come from the composers and writers doing the deepest work. They know the deeper truth. They’ve always known.

Gutenberg has just printed his bibles again. This time, they are not 180 copies but billions, because they’re digital. It looks colossal because we’re already standing inside the productivity theater. The new scenery dwarfs everything we built before.

The real question isn’t “who owns these words?”

The real questions are harder.

What happens when effort and output decouple entirely? We maintained a rough correlation for centuries. The thing someone made bore some relationship to the time and attention they gave it. AI breaks this. A person can produce a 5,000-word essay in thirty seconds. If you can’t tell by reading it, does the origin matter?

What happens when everyone can produce anything? Scarcity shaped culture. The barriers created value beyond economics—the meaning. Difficulty was part of significance.

What happens to the relationship between struggle and meaning? We read the maker’s attention in the made. AI-generated content encodes only a request.

The writers are right to be worried. But they’re worried about the wrong thing.

Or perhaps: they’re worried about the thing they can articulate, because the real worry resists articulation.

The plagiarism debate is a distraction. It lets us fight about law and attribution while ignoring the philosophical abyss underneath.

Meanwhile, the productivity theater continues.

AI hasn’t made us more “productive”. It has made us more prolific at performing productivity.

The gap between “busy” and “useful” was already wide. AI has made it a canyon.

We generate more. We accomplish less. We are artificially productive for artificial reasons.

What does authenticity mean when everything can be synthesized? I don’t have answers. But the questions feel urgent and underexplored. Maybe that’s the point. We’re too busy to ask the questions that really matter. Like we have always been. And I know this will pass too. Like how it has been, always.

For readers unfamiliar: Subramania Bharathi (1882–1921), is our Whitman-meets-Yeats. Democratic fire with mystical intensity. He wrote fierce songs against British colonialism, against caste discrimination, for women’s liberation. They are radical even by today’s standards. His poems remain sung at protests, weddings, school assemblies. He died young, poor, struck by an elephant at a temple. The kind of death that makes legends.

Caste is the crux of Tamil Nadu politics, if not of entire India. From creating narratives to appointing candidates, everything tied with caste calculus.

I recall days when I engaged in debates like these, believing facts and logical arguments would change minds. I’d compile quotes, context, historical evidence. I’d type long responses with citations. I believed in the power of correct information.

Now I watch them continue debates, passionate about positions that will reverse in next election cycle. I sit quiet at tables where friends parse Bharathi’s verse. I feel lonely.

Vilfredo Pareto, the same one behind the 80/20 rule, developed something less famous but more devastating. His theory argues that human action springs from non-logical sources. Residues are deep drives: instincts for preservation, group belonging, maintaining what exists. Derivations are the elaborate justifications we construct afterward. Logic isn’t the engine. It’s the paint job. Pareto saw that humans find relief in believing themselves rational.

Watch the Bharathi debate with Pareto’s lens. The poems haven’t changed. Bharathi hasn’t written anything new recently, being dead since 1921. But suddenly he needs re-evaluation. Why now? Because someone needs him problematic for today’s political formation. Someone else needs him progressive for theirs.

The same verse that was revolutionary last decade becomes casteist this decade. Not because we discovered new meaning. Because we need new ammunition.

The comedy is watching people cite the same poems to prove opposite points. Like Bharathi wrote in quantum states, simultaneously progressive and regressive until political observation collapses him into one.

Pareto's theory was funny when I read it at thirty. Now it doesn’t sound funny. He was documenting tragedy as sociology.

The loneliness isn’t from disagreement. It’s from seeing the mechanism. Like watching a magic show from backstage. You see the strings, the trapdoors, the assistant crouched in the “empty” box. You can’t unsee it. You also can’t participate anymore. Not honestly.

Sometimes they ask why I don’t engage. “You used to have such strong opinions,” they say. I do. The opinion is that we’re all performing derivations while our residues run the show. But saying that out loud is social suicide. So, I just smile. Another derivation to hide my residue: exhaustion with the whole performance.

The cost of knowing what Pareto knew: you become audience to a play where everyone else is cast and script. You lose the comfort of believing in belief itself. Every passionate argument sounds like sophisticated noise.

But you still show up. Still sit at the tables. Still perform enough derivations to stay connected. Because the residue for belonging is stronger than the knowledge that belonging requires performed blindness.

Pareto knew something. Knowing what he knew doesn’t set you free. It just makes you conscious of the cage while you remain inside it.

Years ago, I remember writing to Apple asking how to get my music on iTunes. Apple Music wasn’t even born yet. They replied-professionally, helpfully introducing me to music distributors that I didn’t know existed.

Apple literally started me on this journey. The irony of what follows has not been lost on me.

Day 1: The Optimistic Beginning

I wrote my debut book on artist rights history in Tamil, starting from before the printing press. Apparently, I’m drawn to obsolete battles, because next I decided to become a classical composer in the streaming age.

I was inspired by the sheet music era and stories of Handel and Bach (who never had to argue with an algorithm about genre classifications), I moved from my DAW to a notation software. When I finished my first Piano work, I felt accomplished. After years of writing sync music in isolation, I was ready to share something that was truly mine.

Day 13: The First Encounter

RouteNote used to be free and took WAV files. Now they’re still free but only accept MP3s for the free plan. Look, I get the economics. Storage costs money, and I’m not exactly generating Spotify millions. Algorithms don’t chase me and I don’t chase them; we have a mutual non-aggression pact.

But twenty days for customer support? Twenty days! Wagner could have written another Ring Cycle. That’s when I realized the distribution landscape had transformed while I was peacefully writing sync music.

Day 45: CDBaby and the Discovery

I recalled having a decade old release with CDBaby. Decided to move to CDBaby. It is not free, but they responded before I forgot I’d written to them. Days later, I found my music on Apple Music Classical. I didn’t even know this existed. It’s like discovering a secret room in your house with your furniture already there.

Encouraged, I released a Sonatina and started a Theme and Variations that took sleepless nights.

Day 73: The Hunt for HD Audio

CDBaby doesn’t accept HD audio. Yes, most people listen on phone speakers that make everything sound underwater. But what if want to preserve the rosin of the first chairs for the twelve audiophiles who care. They’re my people. I was writing my new Passacaglia for them.

I decided to try a distributor marketing special platform relationship. I subscribed, submitted, and then...

Day 89: The Genre Wars

They insisted my classical work should be labeled “Instrumental.”

“But it’s a Theme and Variations. In C Major. With….”

“Instrumental.”

“It follows classical form…”

“INSTRUMENTAL.“

I let them distribute it their way. Then it appeared in Qobuz’s Pop section.

POP.

“Echoes in My Chamber: Theme and Variations in C Major, Op.3, No.1” sitting next to contemporary hits. That was the day I dropped opus numbers from titles. If you can’t beat them, stop giving them ammunition.

Don’t ask me why I use opus numbers. I know I am not Beethoven. Because he started losing hearing at my age, but I am just developing tinnitus.

Day 112: The Landscape Survey

Back to CDBaby, who distributed it properly. No drama, just basic competence. Revolutionary.

But still no HD audio. The search continued:

Ditto Music: No HD audio
LANDr: No Classical to Apple Music
iMusician: Want classical AND high-definition audio? That’s their top tier. Though credit where due, they keep your music up even if you stop paying.
Soundrop: The interface seemed to be having an existential crisis. Each edit created a new release. But wait—they accept high-definition audio, and at $0.99 per track? Their system must be flooded with everyone writing a passacaglia for strings to leave a legacy.

Day 124: Understanding the Game

I get it now. Serious distributors are expensive or invite-only because they’re filtering for people who actually make money. Classical metadata requires extra work that isn’t worth it for bedroom producers generating three streams annually.

Then Soundrop raised prices to $4.99. I actually felt relieved. Even their interface seems to be relieved from creating new releases on its own.(pay-per-release is better than subscriptions in my opinion, even if they are expensive.)

Day 126: The TuneCore Tragedy

Desperate, I paid TuneCore’s annual subscription. Then discovered:

They only have “Classical Crossover” (Bach feat. Billie Eilish?)
They can’t deliver classical to Apple Music
Refund policy: “All sales are final” (That is not a refund policy!)

My only real complaint? Tell me upfront. Don’t let me pay THEN mention you can’t deliver to a platform I want to.

Day 156: The Horus Compromise

TuneCore refunded me on request.

Then came Horus Music. They accept classical. They handle HD audio. They seem competent. Responsive customer care. The catch? I can’t choose individual stores.

So, the Passacaglia lives on Boomplay but not Qobuz. It’s like carefully plating a meal, then watching someone serve it wherever they feel like.

But at least it’s reaching somewhere, properly labeled, in the quality I intended.

Day 168: Bandcamp Discovers Curation

Meanwhile, Bandcamp, the one place where my music sits exactly where I put it, introduced “expert curated” playlist subscriptions for fans.

Even the direct pipe wants to become a platform. Even the place that let you just be now wants intermediaries between artist and listener. The experts will curate. The fans will subscribe. The algorithm creeps in through the back door, wearing a turtleneck and calling itself “human curation.”

I understood the economics before it happened. I still felt the weight when it did.

Day 171: The Collective Gambit

Which brings me to Subvert, a collectively owned music platform. Musicians owning the infrastructure. No algorithmic intermediaries. No genre wars with distant support teams.

The irony isn’t lost on me: I spent 170 days navigating distribution chaos, only to help build another platform. But this time, the inmates run the asylum. We’re the ones deciding where the Passacaglia lives.

Will it work? Ask me in another 170 days.

For now, I’m a founding member of a cooperative while simultaneously being distributed by Horus to platforms I don’t control, maintaining my Bandcamp where I have complete control, but curators are arriving, and figuring out what Subvert is going to be.

Epilogue

I’ve picked Soundrop for my next release. Unsubscribed from Horus Music today. They’re taking down the Passacaglia from Boomplay.

The question that persists: Is distributing to streaming platforms worth all this trouble?

This isn’t just my story. Many artists live this. They just don’t write about it.
That’s the difference.

PS: This post I published elsewhere. This is a revised edition with updates

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That is technically functional but fundamentally wrong. So, I traced it back to the source: LinkedIn. That platform where everyone begins their posts with rocket emojis and their career trajectories pretend to make sense.

LinkedIn wanted me to pick: full-time, part-time, employed, or self-employed?

The platform already had my education and my past industry positions that could look unconnected and strange to anyone seeking a narrative arc like someone threw darts at a career board blindfolded.

I went to LinkedIn to remove “self-employment”
“Tell me your employment status,” LinkedIn insisted.

But I am not employed. I am not self-employed. I am not a composer who builds. I am not a builder who composes. I am someone who sees foam pyramids everywhere and occasionally makes things that don’t lie.

The platform wanted me to network. To connect. To build my professional brand.

But I was already connected to the harmonic series I follow, to the earth I compress, to readers who don’t need algorithms to find me. My “network” includes structural engineers who trust my density calculations and musicians who understand why I ruthlessly kill darlings in my Chaconne’s second act.

So, I deleted my profile.

Then I recreated an empty profile as a placeholder to show that parking slot is reserved for someone who just sold their car.

Google will update eventually.

LinkedIn asked what I do.
I deleted the question.
That’s the most honest answer I could give.

P.S. - If you found this without LinkedIn suggesting we connect, you’re already outside their pyramid. The air’s clearer here, even if we’re all still pretending it means something.

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It begins melancholic, with a theme that knows something you don’t yet. Call it retrospective, the kind of melody that carries the weight of looking back, of understanding things only in hindsight. This is our protagonist: a musical thought that already holds its ending in its beginning.

But music, like life, rarely stays in one emotional place. There’s this moment, not quite arrival, not quite departure, where the piece begins to stretch toward something else. Think of it as that liminal space when you’re no longer who you were but not yet who you’re becoming. The music warms up here, transitions, breathes differently. It’s testing the air of a brighter place but hasn’t committed yet.

Then, our second theme unfurls with an energy that feels almost defiant against all that retrospection. It sings, it dances, it insists on present-tense joy. But even joy has gravity, and eventually, this theme descends, slowing, as if remembering that all things that rise must touch ground again.

The middle section is where the alchemy happens. The opening theme returns; but altered. Like looking at your childhood home through different eyes. The music breaks into fragments, these pieces of memory scattering and reforming. There are notes here that slide between the expected ones and those in-between sounds that don’t quite belong but somehow feel truer because of their strangeness.

There’s this moment that speaks to me most deeply. It’s the musical equivalent of homesickness, but for a home that might only exist in memory. The opening idea speaks here with a longing that feels almost too personal to share.

When the dancing theme returns, something has transformed. Same notes, same rhythm. But not the same. It’s like meeting an old friend after years apart; the familiarity is there, but both of you have been changed by time and distance. The journey has done its work.

The ending brings us home with those sliding, in-between notes again—sounds that suggest maybe home isn’t a fixed point but a constellation of possibilities.

It understands that repetition is never really repetition. Every return is also a revision. Every homecoming is also a departure. It knows what we sometimes forget. That transformation isn’t about becoming someone else, but about becoming more fully who we always were, just couldn’t see it yet.

When you listen, you might hear something entirely different. That’s the beauty of it. The narrative I hear is just one path through this sonic landscape. Your ears might find different stories in these same sounds.

I’m curious. What journey do you hear when the opening theme first emerges? Does the dancing theme feel like arrival or escape to you? Sometimes I think the most honest music is the kind that asks more questions than it answers, that leaves space for each listener to find their own emotional geography within its measures.

A closing thought: What draws me to this piece, and perhaps to music in general is, how different musical ideas can live in conversation with each other. The retrospective theme and the dancing one aren’t just contrasts; they’re in dialogue, changing each other through their interaction. This feels true. We’re all made of contrasting voices, different versions of ourselves in conversation. The beauty isn’t in resolving these contrasts but in letting them speak to each other, transform each other, and ultimately create something richer than either could alone.

1. News about the Spotify lawsuit

The argument is that AI bots play Drake’s songs, he collects royalties, and it is cheating.

Everyone is sharing the lawsuit. Screenshots. Opinions. Drake’s name is the hook. The lawsuit is the headline. But neither is the story. They are only the visible tip. The rest sinks beneath the surface.

If you’ve never heard of payola

In the 1950s, American radio was rocked by a scandal that exposed the music industry.
Known as the “payola” scandal, it revealed a widespread practice where record companies secretly paid radio DJs to play specific songs, manipulating the charts and public tastes.

But payola never disappeared. We have “playlist pitching,” “marketing budgets,” “fan engagement services,” etc. The industry pretends the numbers are organic. Everyone else pretends to believe it.

At the core is a system that rewards inflation. Spotify pays artist royalties from a single pool. The artist with the most streams, takes the largest share. Fake streams do not evaporate. They steal from someone else.

But fixing one fraud inside a pro-rata system is cosmetic. The math itself is broken. It is theft even without a fake stream. It works because it looks like math. You cannot clean a pool that keeps filling from a dirty pipe.

The lawsuit is not trying to punish Drake. It is trying to make the machine show its gears. Everyone is staring at the tip of the iceberg. The rest is still underwater.

For years, musicians relied on platforms like Bandcamp to sell directly to fans without a middleman. Bandcamp was sold twice. It wasn’t killed the way AmieStreet was. But unlike Spotify, Bandcamp relies on a human algorithm these days.

Ventures like Magnatune could not survive either.

2. The new music platform Subvert is in its alpha phase

I am writing this as a founding member of the platform. A music platform owned by its users through a cooperative structure. Musicians, fans, and workers get ownership stakes. One member, one vote.

The clever part? They separated the co-op (which holds voting control) from the business entity (which can take investment). Investors can put money in but cannot control decisions. It is structurally different.

Co-ops aren’t new. They are 19th-century solutions to 19th-century problems, now applied to 21st-century platforms.

Why I joined Subvert

I am not Western enough for classical music, and not traditional enough for Carnatic music. Wrong for traditional labels, too weird for algorithm categories. I generally exist in the margins between systems.

But here’s the thing: I need to sell music somewhere. The choice isn’t between platforms and no platforms. It is between platforms that admit they are platforms and platforms that pretend they are movements.

Every platform promises to be different until it needs to be sustainable. Then the math takes over. Co-op ownership doesn’t change the math, but it changes who does the calculations. That makes it different.

I am a founding member of Subvert the way I am a composer of classical music. Using inherited structures without accepting their embedded assumptions. Even for someone skeptical, the co-op model is not worse than the corporate model. That is enough reason to participate while maintaining clarity about what participation means.

Subvert is a platform where being an edge case isn’t a bug. Co-ops don’t need to categorize you into pre-existing boxes to extract value. They need you to bring what you bring. The weirder the members, the richer the ecosystem.

If you are either an artist or a music lover interested in the conversation, you are invited

The bottom line

The Spotify lawsuit will pass. The headlines will fade. Platforms will adjust their language and continue as usual.

But with Subvert, ownership changes behavior. When the users hold the keys, manipulation becomes pointless. You do not need bots to steal from yourself.

A system built on extraction needs noise to survive. A system built on participation only needs signal. That is the difference.

That is why Subvert exists.

Subvert — The Collectively Owned Music Marketplace

I was strict about the bedroom boundary. When I returned after a month of work, she had colonized my side of the bed, specifically seeking my used clothes, my towels—anything that held my scent.

We developed a language. Different meows for different needs, accompanied by specific gestures. Sometimes I assume I understand. Understanding gives comfort, even when it’s constructed. Even unbearable problems become bearable when I believe I understand them.

By my work table sits a window. I work late nights; the kitten turned nocturnal with me. We became creatures of parallel rhythm, sleeping through the day while the world conducted its business. Through that window, she would hunt. One midnight, a lizard. I told my family to watch her—snakes live where we live.

I began closing the window at night.

The monsoon is late this year. Two weeks of moderate rain. Three nights ago, she stood by that window with a specific meow—eyes almost closed, a particular insistence I’d learned to read.

I opened the window. Let her go.

When I finished work and prepared for bed, she hadn’t returned. As I’d done previous nights, I closed the window. Previous nights, she’d waited on the portico until morning. This time, morning came without her.

It was Diwali night when she left. Firecrackers, rain—reasons for a cat to hide. She was in heat, female, not spayed. Perhaps she went for love. We have no solid reasoning. For two days, the family mood hung heavy.

Cat, dog, human—we construct memories, inquiries. I ask myself: what if I hadn’t closed the window? No solid answer comes. I look at the window while working, expecting her head between the grills before she jumps in.

Yesterday I told my son she would be happy somewhere, especially if she’d gone for love. Or I wanted to tell myself that. This doesn’t change that I’m not a cat person. Maybe she wasn’t a cat to me. I cannot articulate what I mean.

My son wanders at dusk and dawn, ringing the bell she played with.

Today, while I worked, looking at the window between sessions, my wife’s voice interrupted: “Please don’t start anything significant this week. Either music or something else. We want you this week.”

She’s right. The washing machine has waited a month for installation. I live in a rammed earth house I built—no plumber or electrician works without my presence. They need me when walls are involved. The new location requires drilling through rammed earth for the water outlet. Local plumbers tried once, thinking it was just a “mud wall.”

Like cats, walls have our mental constructs. I don’t think we can see anything without them.

When my wife says don’t start anything significant, she means something. At times, I venture into something and don’t return as expected.

Like the cat for whom we still wait.

The Foundation

F minor. The key of deep introspection, of questions asked in darkness. The bass line descends, circles back on itself, creates a harmonic prison that feels both inevitable and inescapable. Like walking the same four hallways of a building, discovering new details each time but never finding the exit.

The passacaglia form originated in 17th-century Spain as a street dance. Street music became court music became sacred music—transformation through repetition, exactly what this piece explores.

The Variations

Each variation is a room built on the same foundation, yet opening onto different views. The first few variations feel like basement chambers—low strings exploring the depths of the harmonic cycle, finding beauty in constraint.

By the middle variations, we’ve climbed to ground level. Violins begin their conversations, fragments of melody that suggest windows, doorways, possibilities. The same harmonic foundation now supports different architectures of hope.

The final variations ascend toward something resembling joy—not the naive happiness that ignores darkness, but the earned lightness that comes from having walked through it. The strings don’t abandon the bass line; they transform its meaning.

The Resolution

We end not by escaping the cycle, but by learning to dance within it. The same eight measures that felt like chains now feel like a rhythm, a heartbeat, a home base from which to venture out and return.

The passacaglia taught me something essential: transformation doesn’t require abandoning the foundation. Sometimes freedom comes not from breaking the pattern, but from discovering new ways to move within it.

My first "DAW" was a PASCAL program I wrote, using the PC speaker for beep sounds (pre-multimedia era), sending frequency values in Hz to produce music. A string input would generate a melody. Raag Amrithavarshini was convincing even without gamak- the pitch bends

The first actual DAW I used is now in a museum. Its developer creates iOS apps these days. Time moves differently in software years.

My friendship with algorithms is lengthy and laborious. I've watched them evolve from simple IF-THEN statements to neural networks that write marketing blogs and songs that could flood Spotify.

I said it was lengthy and laborious.

Lengthy: Sitting through debates about whether we were in the fourth or fifth generation during Prolog sessions.

But what haunts me still is the laborious part: The practical exam asked me to find a factorial. I know—finding factorial is easy for an exam. But not with a processor console that takes hexadecimal inputs. That's MACHINE LANGUAGE.

I guess people often misunderstand what “rigorous study” means. But I never hated algorithms. Even when they classified my Theme and Variations as Pop in one instance. If you are from India, Theme and Variations is like Niraval in Carnatic. You pick a theme and play the variations of the same.

Actually, I tried a French overture style variation. After writing the scores, either it wasn't convincing, or I found a better inspiration. But I kept the bass part of the overture style for that ceremonial gravity. Algorithm caught it “Pop Beat”.

A distributor put it under different classification, and the platform it was distributed to does not have a slot for that classification.

I realized: Algorithm and me. We both trying to process music through systems designed for three-minute pop songs. Neither of us fits the framework.

That's why we have our pact. Algorithms don't chase me (my Spotify stats confirm this), and I don't chase them. We recognize each other as edge cases in our respective worlds

The algorithm that put my Theme and Variations in the Pop section wasn't broken. It was doing exactly what it was told with the limited options it had. The humans who built the system never imagined someone would upload "Echoes in My Chamber: Theme and Variations"

Edge cases, both of us. That's our kinship.

Van Steyn had heard the stories for months. Local fishermen spoke of "Buaya Darat"—The land crocodiles, on islands they avoided after dark. Curiosity burned in Van Steyn’s his chest.

He pushed through dense jungle, branches whipping across his face. The forest air was humid and heavy. Towering trees groaned against each other in the wind.

Then he encountered it.

A ten-foot-long, saw-toothed lizard emerged from a bush. The creature's forked tongue flicked out, tasting the air. Van Steyn's spine turned to ice. The world had never known such a creature existed.

News of the Komodo dragon exploded across newspapers worldwide.

The Birth of a Monster

Merian Cooper, a Hollywood director, was captivated by the discovery. His appetite for adventure stories had found its perfect meal.

When Cooper's friend, adventurer William Douglas Burden, announced his plan to hunt Komodo dragons in 1926, Cooper listened intently. Burden returned with two live specimens for the Bronx Zoo, where crowds pressed against barriers to glimpse these prehistoric survivors.

But it was Burden's stories, not the dragons themselves that ignited Cooper's imagination. Tales of an island shaped like a skull, of dangers lurking in the jungle, of bringing a monster back to civilization. These seeds grew in Cooper's mind into something magnificent: a giant ape discovered on a remote island and dragged to New York City.

King Kong was born from the collision of a real dragon and a dreamer's ambition.

The Strategic Novel

Cooper was shrewd. Before filming began, he had writer friend Delos W. Lovelace transform his screenplay into a novel, published a year before the movie's release. This wasn't just merchandising. It was building hunger.

The gambit worked. When "King Kong" hit theaters in 1933, it conquered. The image of Kong atop the Empire Building became iconic.

Cooper had been obsessed with gorillas since age six. Once, while filming in Africa, encountering baboons gave him the idea for an ape protagonist. The name came to him like a drumbeat: "Kong... there was something mysterious about it."

King Kong vs. Godzilla: The Shock

Cooper believed his rights to King Kong belonged to him alone.

Then came that morning in 1962.

Cooper's coffee froze halfway to his lips. There in the newspaper was an advertisement: "King Kong vs. Godzilla." His Kong. Fighting a Japanese monster. Without his permission.

With trembling fingers, he called his lawyer.

Investigation revealed that RKO Pictures, the studio that produced his original film, had sold King Kong's rights to Japan's Toho Studios behind his back. They'd also been selling comics and merchandise, profiting from Cooper's creation.

Cooper's original contract with RKO was clear: he would direct for a salary but retain character rights. RKO couldn't sell Kong without his permission. They had anyway.

Cooper sued, but victory eluded him. During his service as a World War II pilot, crucial documents had vanished—including papers that proved Kong belonged to him.

The Remake Wars: 1975

By 1975, Hollywood had transformed, but King Kong's power remained unchanged. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis decided a Kong remake would print money. He paid RKO handsomely for remake rights.

Universal Studios, having lost the bidding, responded with an absurd claim: they'd been "verbally promised" the rights.

Then Universal's lawyers discovered something everyone had forgotten: Delos Lovelace's novel. The copyright had expired. No one had renewed it. The novel had slipped into public domain.

Universal announced they would produce "The Legend of King Kong" based on this public domain novel. They even began pre-production, pressuring De Laurentiis.

In 1976, an out-of-court settlement ended the fight. Universal shelved their production. De Laurentiis released his remake successfully.

The Son Fights Back

Cooper died in 1973. His son Richard inherited the fight.

Richard Cooper went to court with fresh lawyers and old grievances. The verdict finally came:

Cooper's contract with RKO covered only the original "King Kong" and "Son of Kong." Every subsequent deal RKO made was unauthorized. Those profits belonged to Cooper's heirs.

The novel remained in public domain. But the character of King Kong? That belonged to the Coopers.

Richard sold these rights to Universal Studios.

Donkey Kong: When Nintendo Met Kong

1982. Arcade games were conquering the world quarter by quarter. In a Seattle bar, players pumped coins into a machine where a carpenter named Jumpman (later Mario) rescued his girlfriend from an ape.

The game was Donkey Kong. Universal smelled opportunity.

Fresh from purchasing Cooper's rights, Universal sued Nintendo for trademark infringement. Nintendo hired John Kirby, whose strategy was devastating.

Kirby excavated Universal's own arguments from 1976 — where Universal had claimed King Kong was public domain. He presented these arguments back to Universal like a mirror.

The judge didn't just rule against Universal; he excoriated them for hypocrisy. The court also noted that "Donkey Kong" and "King Kong" were entirely different names.

Nintendo's victory was so complete, they celebrated magnificently. They gifted John Kirby a $30,000 sailboat named "Donkey Kong." They also named a pink, spherical video game character after him—Kirby—who would star in dozens of games, immortalizing the lawyer who saved their empire.

Who Owns King Kong Today?

Today, King Kong's rights are scattered across Hollywood:

Universal Studios operates King Kong theme park attractions with rights obtained from Richard Cooper.

Cooper's heirs retain certain publishing rights for King Kong books and comics.

Warner Bros, through corporate acquisitions, controls the original RKO film rights.

What exactly Universal bought remains sealed in contracts.

The great irony? A character born from one man's vision has become a fractured legal entity. King Kong's copyright has been torn apart and distributed across Hollywood—as if the great ape himself had grabbed it in both hands and ripped it to pieces in his final rage.

What started as a Dutch officer stumbling upon a real monster in an Indonesian jungle became one of cinema's most enduring myths—and copyright law's most magnificent mess.